UAE Corporate Tax Calculator

How UAE corporate tax is calculated

The structure is simple and the complication sits underneath it. Taxable income up to AED 375,000 is taxed at 0%. Everything above that is taxed at 9%. There is no sliding scale and no additional band.

So a company with AED 800,000 of taxable income pays nothing on the first AED 375,000 and 9% on the remaining AED 425,000 — AED 38,250. That is an effective rate of 4.8% on total income, which is the figure worth quoting rather than the headline 9%.

The formula

Tax payable = (Taxable income − AED 375,000) × 9%, where the result is not less than zero.

The hard part is getting to taxable income

The calculator starts from taxable income because that is what the rate applies to. Getting there from your accounting profit is where the actual work sits, and where most errors originate.

Taxable income is accounting profit adjusted for items the law treats differently. Common adjustments:

• Add back disallowable expenditure — entertainment beyond the permitted proportion, fines and penalties, certain donations, and personal expenditure that has been running through the company.
• Adjust depreciation where the accounting treatment differs from the tax treatment.
• Remove provisions that do not yet meet the conditions for deduction.
• Apply interest limitation rules where they bite.
• Correct related-party pricing to an arm's length basis under transfer pricing rules.

If you have never done that exercise, the figure you type in here is an estimate — and the gap between accounting profit and taxable income is routinely larger than people expect. We work through the ones we see most often in the corporate tax return errors guide.

Small Business Relief, and why it matters this year

Where revenue for the tax period is AED 3 million or less, an eligible company can elect Small Business Relief and be treated as having no taxable income at all. Not a lower rate — no taxable income.

Two things to know. The test is on revenue, not profit, and it is a cliff rather than a slope: exceed AED 3 million and the relief is lost for that period entirely, and does not return in later periods even if revenue falls back.

The relief now applies to tax periods ending on or before 31 December 2029, following Ministerial Decision No. 131 of 2026, which extended it from the previous 31 December 2026 cut-off. For a company on a calendar year, the period ending 31 December 2029 is the last one it covers. Select "no" in the calculator to see what your first post-relief period looks like — for most companies that number is the point of using this tool at all. The extension and what it does not change are covered in the Small Business Relief guide.

The free zone 0% option is conditional

Selecting "yes" for Qualifying Free Zone Person shows zero tax, because that is what the rate produces. Whether you are entitled to it is a separate question with six cumulative conditions, tested every period: a juridical person in a free zone, adequate substance, qualifying income from qualifying activities, non-qualifying revenue within the de minimis limit, transfer pricing compliance, and audited financial statements.

Fail one and the status is lost for that period and, under the current rules, for subsequent periods too. Holding a free zone licence does not grant it. Read the QFZP guide before planning around a 0% figure.

Before you rely on the UAE corporate tax calculator result

The arithmetic here is exact and has been checked against worked examples. What a calculator cannot do is know your situation — your contract, your licence category, the elections available to you, or the exceptions that might apply. It applies a formula to the figures you give it.

Use it to get a sense of scale, to sanity-check something you have been quoted, or to work a problem through for yourself. Where the number is going into a decision that matters, have the assumptions underneath it checked. That conversation is free and it usually takes twenty minutes.